magamo wrote:Something to note here: Statics in this case, as enabled by exterior grid size with a value of anything greater than one are the full meshes... I highly suspect that the fully detailed terrain is still being rendered, as evidenced on how that feature acts when distant terrain is disabled.

I tried setting the exterior cell load to high and see if land would be fully rendered in those cells. But that doesn't appear to be the case and it seems to be simplified.

[quote="DestinedToDie"I tried setting the exterior cell load to high and see if land would be fully rendered in those cells. But that doesn't appear to be the case and it seems to be simplified.[/quote]

One thing I found interesting about this is how strangely discomforting it is to lose your sense of scale. Without statics or proper fog, it's hard to tell how close that giant hill is in the distance (or if it's even giant at all). Jumping with 10k+ acrobatics almost feels like you're suddenly exiting a town and flying up into a small room with little islands on the floor. It's very hard to describe, but it's also sort of neat.

Anyways, thanks for all of the hard work scrawl! With this and the new movement improvements, the next release seems like it's going to be pretty meaty.

DestinedToDie wrote:I just thought of something. I recommend the max small object culling to be 16 pixels, but in my tests I ran my game at 1280x720 aspect ratio. If you are using a higher resolution, you may have to also use higher small object culling to get the same result.

Got a chance to try it out last night and it's pretty amazing!
I agree with the 16 px max. I tried 24 px and weird things started popping in and out of existence like portions of NPCs armor and stuff. It also didn't really help much. I also noticed that it took a good couple seconds on entering an exterior cell for the frames to stabilize regardless of most of my settings so that would be something to optimize. Here's what I found with distant land on:

So it's definitely playable at 3 but optimal at 2 cells. It's pretty much not noticeable that you're not loading more stuff when you're on flat ground, but if you're significantly elevated at all, it's very obvious and kind of distracting. Still excited though! It can only get better!

For perspective, here's my specs:
i7 4790K @ 4 GHz
GTX 970
16 GB RAM
and most of my games are run off SSD

I don't remember all my OpenMW settings, but pretty much everything is on highest quality with 8x AA.

drakovyrn wrote:Just curious, besides simplifying land meshes and object culling, what are some other methods for optimizing view distance?

Distant statics. When at a certain distance from a static, we could swap it out for a simplified mesh. That way you still see a castle in the distance, but we do not have to render the entirety of its detail (and you're unlikely to make the detail out from far away anyway).

One thing to note is that currently AI for NPCs and creatures is active if they are being rendered. Not only are they walking around, playing their idle animations and also colliding with stuff in their path and making the physics go up. I suppose this could be disabled at a certain distance so we don't spend resources on them. Similarly, scripts from all loaded cells are run and limiting them could also lessen our resource expenditure.

DestinedToDie wrote:One thing to note is that currently AI for NPCs and creatures is active if they are being rendered. Not only are they walking around, playing their idle animations and also colliding with stuff in their path and making the physics go up. I suppose this could be disabled at a certain distance so we don't spend resources on them. Similarly, scripts from all loaded cells are run and limiting them could also lessen our resource expenditure.

Do NPCs and animated textures/objects hurt performance considerably? Beyond Vvardenfell, I've been taking a look at the mainland (courtesy of the very amazing Tamriel Rebuilt project), and I gotta say, just taking a stroll through Old Ebonheart feels like wiping with my bare hand, and that's after even decreasing view distance to its lowest. Hopefully, you have an idea of what I mean. Would you be able to explain why Old Ebonheart requires so much in resources, and what could be done to help it?